Buy the cheapest digital cable that works reliably and don't spend a dime more.

You and grandparent are saying the exact same thing. The point that GP was making is that some of the cheapest of the cheap cables don't even meet the relevant specifications and that that can cause problems.

You don't need cables made out of gold, but you often do need them to conform to the specs. I've had this problem with cheap as shit HDMI cables where my components wouldn't recognize each other until I replaced the cables with monoprice cables. So it's not like I had to spend a ton, but I did have to get actual certified cables.

I have also experienced this with uber-cheap HDMI cables. Tried to connect components with the cheapest HDMI cables possible (they came for free with some of the components that I bought) and there were problems. I forget what it was, but I think the TV wouldn't talk to to the Blu-Ray or the Tivo or something. I don't remember, but anyway, shit wouldn't talk to each other until I replaced the crap HDMI cables with monoprice cables. Still very cheap, but at least they are tested and meet the relevant specs.

In July of 2011, Michele Bachmann was in second place in the polls and closing in on Mitt Romney. I think the likelihood of Trump ending up as the Republican presidential nominee is equal to the likelihood that Bachmann was going to be the Republican nominee for the 2012 elections. It ain't gonna happen.

Nope. I have not seen a single physical server in a decade, and at this point, I run everything in AWS. If an instance has a problem, I just snapshot it, kill it, and launch a new one. Once that's done, I can take my time reviewing the logs and state from the failed instance's snapshot to try to avoid future faults.

I literally have every password in/etc/shadow set to *. There is not a single account on any system with a valid password hash in shadow (as is the default on most AWS images). This is why I give zero hoots about brute forcing passwords.

That may have been true 15 years ago, but it's blatantly false today. I have a client with a legacy Perl text processing job that was beginning to run too slowly to keep up (log processing was starting to take longer than the log files were generated). They were going to buy an expensive log analysis tool, so I asked them if they actually wanted the tool or if they were happy with the output of their Perl script. They preferred the output of the script. So I said, "Give me a few hours."

A few hours later, I had translated the Perl script, line-by-line, into (I shit you not) Java. Ran two orders of magnitude faster. In Java.

Yes, slashdot's favorite whipping boy of a language bested Perl by two orders of magnitude.

Doctors do not spend 11 years of post-secondary education and training to differentiate bacterial vs. viral infections. I guarantee that you can train a person in far fewer than 11 years to follow the same process that an MD does for this specific task.

In my neck of the woods, we have convenient care clinics staffed with nurse practitioners who are trained in very specific tasks. You can go see them for cheap for simple issues which they can treat for you, but they also recognize when your particular case is not simple and will tell you you need to go see a doctor.

Trust is not a binary value. You need to be able to trust employees to do their jobs obviously, but do you need to trust each employee not to accidentally download malware from the public internet? Because I'd trust most IT professionals not to infect their machines, but would you necessarily trust your average user in marketing or HR or accounting or an admin assistant? Because that's how I'd look at it: I'd trust those people to do their jobs correctly, but I would not trust them to protect their machines from infection.

Reddit doesn't care if you post repugnant shit as long as it's not child porn and you stay in your little corner of the Internet and don't bother others./r/CoonTown is a good example of a repository of repugnant shit, but that keeps to themselves. The only reason I even know it exists is because it comes up in discussions of horrible subreddits.

But if you spill out of your little corner of Reddit, then that's when the admins get involved. If you're harassing people on other parts of Reddit, then you see shadowbans. And if you're harassing people offline (doxxing, etc.), then the admins expect the subreddit mods to do something about it. And if the subreddit mods aren't fixing it (deleting the offending content, banning the offending users), then the admins step in and ban the subreddit.

This is a pretty reasonable policy. Some may contend that it's not being applied fairly and equally (ahem SRS), but the policy itself is reasonable.

About half the people who call my company looking for a rent house don't answer the phone when you attempt to call them or their voicemail hasn't been set up, or it is full. What am I supposed to do, keep calling them until they answer?

You take the hint and send them a text, my friend. That's why their voicemail box is full or uninitialized. They don't do voicemail.

To study in the US you need a student visa which expires after you graduate or flunk out. If you stay outside of that, without having an something like an H1B or a green card you're illegal. simple. And those are not so easy/quick to get.

I've never understood our immigration policy.

Mexican peasant who will be dependent on welfare for your whole life? Welcome to America!

Educated, ambitious, and ready to help grow the US economy? Eww! GTFO!